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Adaptec EasyCD Creator Question

A coworker of mine uses EasyCD Creator while I use Nero. He said that EasyCD comes with some program that "formats" your CD-R for multi-session (or something like that) and then he can drag and drop files to his burner in explorer and it simply "adds" them to the multi-session CD - like an OLE drag and drop.
Does anyone know what this is about? I'm kind of jealous as I don't think it would be that easy using Nero.

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System Shock 2 - If you haven't tried it you don't know what your missing!

The Program is called Direct CD. It formats cd-r or cd-rw discs for use with "packet writing." Packet Writing is when the user drags files to the cd-writer and the data is written to the disc. The downside to this is that when a disc is formatted for packet writing, the disc capacity is lowered to about 400MB (Someone correct me if I'm wrong). I don't know if Nero has the packet writing feature.

That is called multi-session. You can burn some stuff on a CDR without closing it. Next time you can burn something else on it and add up stuff, etc. But you could not delete things. Nothing fancy. Mutlti-session CDR sometimes can be difficult to read on other cd roms though.

Viper is correct, it is called packet writing and it is not handled directly by Easy CD but instead by a companion program call "Direct CD". The last time I looked at Nero (5.0) it also came with a companion program called InCD to handle packet writing, though I didnít install it so I donít know what itís like.

Both Nero and Easy CD support multisession directly (no companion program needed) and I actually prefer to use simple multi-session for both my CD-Rís and CD-RWís. The reasons I prefer this are
1. No need for special format.
2. No need for programs Direct CD or InCD sitting in my task bar taking up resources. (For some reason that I donít fully understand, all packet writing software seems to need to load itself via the registry and stay active at all times. You dont seem to be able to just launch it when you want and leave it unloaded other times. Programs like that just naturally seem to **** me.)
3. Multi session CDís can be read on any other computer (as long as the CDROM drive isnít too ancient). Packet written CDís need both a multisession capable CD drive and some more annoying software to be able to be read on another computer.

Well of course there are advantages to using packet writing. It makes your CD-RW disk behave like a big arsed floppy. The main difference is that with packet writing you can erase files individually like you can on a floppy but with multisession you just add more and more until the cdrw disk is full, then either archive it or erase the whole thing and start again.

Excellent replies, guys, thanks. Sounds like crap to me too. The only thing I want sitting in my taskbar is ZoneAlarm, my personal firewall (have a cable modem). Sounds like a high-price to pay for convenience. In reality, I'll never need that level of convenience. I'm just going to be doing some backups on a regular basis, probably multi-session, so the DirectCD thing really doesn't make sense for me.

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System Shock 2 - If you haven't tried it you don't know what your missing!

Adaptec`s "DirectCD" is one of the most trouible free, handy programs I have ever used! I would never consider reformatting without installing it.

However, I agree about the need to have it load at boot and taking up resourses.
So, the simple solution is to disable it from loading at boot via "msconfig".
Just load it from the menue whenever you wish to use it and "alt/ctrl/del" out of it when done. It works absolutly perfect this way!